Greener laptop
2008-08-06

                                                                                 Greener laptop

Several days ago, I watch an article, Your Laptop's Dirty Little Secret, on www.time.com. It is said that laptop contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. Today's laptops might one day be compared to the diesel trucks of the ‘50s, at least in the sense that both could be greatly improved in the area of environmental health. While they don't spit out tons of carbon dioxide, laptops do have their share of problems. They guzzle power, contain toxic components, pose recycling problems, and are adding to our landfills.

However, more and more people use laptop instead of desktop computer. So, how to make the laptop greener is quite important. Fortunately a large number of researchers are looking into laptop technology that's a little friendlier toward the environment. Here's how designers plan to make this ubiquitous gadget more eco-friendly across its entire life span, from manufacture to recycling.

1. Use fewer hazardous materials.

The InfoWorld World Books should surpasses the provisions of the EU's RoHS (Restrictions on the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directive: They should meet all the required and optional criteria pertaining to the use of environmentally sensitive materials set forth by EPEAT (the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool). That includes the elimination of intentionally added cadmium, mercury, lead, hexavalent chromium, and certain dangerous flame retardants. Additionally, the systems' large plastic parts are free of PVC.

2. upgrade instead of abandoning The EPA estimates that Americans discard 19,000 tons of laptops a year. But, now, some companies are trying to make it easier and cheaper for people to upgrade the laptops they already have, rather than throwing them away and buying new ones. Laptop-maker Asus recently released a model that lets users change the processor, graphics card and other parts just by removing one panel, instead of spending hours disassembling the computer.

3. find something to take place of the toxic components When the laptop was abandoned, some of the components are toxic and can leak poisons in the ground. The toxic components pollute the ground seriously. So, to address the issue, some researcher advanced to replace lead solder with silver or copper.

4. build for reuse Drawing from the EPEAT criteria, the material of laptop should be designed for easy disassembly and recycling at the end of their lives. They should contain a reduced number of plastic material types; their molded or glued-in metals parts should either be eliminated or easily removable; at least 90 percent of their parts should be reusable or recyclable; and all the plastic parts (aside from the tiny ones) should be clearly identified by material type and be easy to remove. These eco-friendly features are significant. They mean that hardware vendors can disassemble machines more quickly and efficiently and reuse parts for building new machines. That's good for the environment, as well as the bottom line.

5. improve the components of laptop Future laptops could knock 10 percent off their energy use just by replacing hard drives with solid-state, or flash memory, which has no watt-hungry moving parts. Dell debuted a laptop with a 32-gigabyte solid-state drive this year. By 2012, manufacturer Samsung says, the drives may hold about 30 times as much data. Also, the petroleum-filled plastic cases require a good deal of oil and energy to produce, but a few companies are investigating making cases out of bioplastics, such as corn polymers, to save energy

6. Design for extended life. In order to make the greener laptop, extending the life-span of the laptop is also important. According to drawing from EPEAT, these dream laptops should be built to last. Among other things, that entails constructing the systems in a modular fashion such that their major component and processor can be upgraded or replaced using common tools. Moreover, the vendor would have to agree to make spare, replacement, or new parts available for a minimum of five years.